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Thank the hockey gods for medical oversight. The last time Joffrey Lupul partook in an NHL game, after all, he went into a corner in pursuit of the puck and came out searching for his equilibrium.

This was last Thursday against the Flyers, after Lupul’s helmet was rudely introduced to Jay Rosehill’s shoulder pad in the midst of a pinball collision that also included Rosehill’s teammate Adam Hall. Lupul’s legs looked rubbery as he wobbled off the ice. Fans cringed when he couldn’t immediately locate the door to the bench. Yet despite his obvious impairment, it wasn’t long before Lupul itched to get back into the NHL’s theatre of peril.

“I wanted to come back during that game,” Lupul said. “I think it’s a good thing where the doctor steps in and says, ‘Listen, just looking at the way you came off the ice, you’re done for the night.’”

Lupul, speaking at the Maple Leafs’ Etobicoke practice rink while his teammates prepared to play the Rangers in Manhattan on Wednesday, said that now, nearly a week after the collision, he can’t be sure when he’ll return to action. He said he “didn’t want to get into” the details of his current symptoms, but Wednesday marked the second straight day he’d stayed off the ice. Instead, he spent an afternoon honing his wrist shot and backhand in the team’s dryland shooting gallery. Getting back on the blades Thursday remains a possibility, said Lupul, who last partook in drills during Monday’s morning skate. Nothing is for sure, but at least this was something.

“If I was having bad symptoms, I would be home resting instead of this,” Lupul said. “It’s truly a day-to-day thing, just wake up in the morning and see how I’m feeling, how I’m progressing. There’s really no reason for me to rush right now. I just want to make sure I’m back at 100 per cent.”

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If it sounds an awful lot like he is suffering the effects of a certain C-word, the club has not termed Lupul’s injury a concussion. Lupul, for the record, assumes he has endured precisely that.

“Yeah,” he said Wednesday, when asked if he believes he suffered a concussion against the Flyers. “I mean, no one’s really said that word to me. But I definitely didn’t sprain my ankle.”

Lupul laughed a little and paused for thought.

“I think it’s safe to say I took a pretty solid blow to the head,” Lupul said. “Anyone who was watching could have seen that. . . . Obviously anyone who saw me try to go to the bench could tell there were some symptoms.”

Lupul said he isn’t certain why, in some hockey circles, there appears to be an aversion to calling concussions what they are, even if experts will tell you “concussion” is a relatively inert term compared to a more precise synonym such as, say, “brain trauma.” The team’s official diagnosis, of course, is “upper-body injury.”

Certainly there’s semantics involved, not to mention the long-held paranoia around transparency on the NHL injury list. And then there’s the simple matter of word association.

“When people say ‘concussion,’ they think of Sidney Crosby sitting out a year. Whereas I can say, right now, I feel fairly good,” Lupul said. “There’s obviously different severities of blows to the head. And I think it can be misconstrued. You look at (teams not using the word ‘concussion’) and you say, ‘Oh, they just want him to come back . . . ’”

There is no such nefariousness going on in Leafland, Lupul insisted.

“There hasn’t even been a question like, ‘Do you feel like you can play?’ The question has been, ‘How do you feel?’ And I’ve tried to be as honest as possible,” Lupul said. “ I don’t know why that word (concussion) is not used. But I can say that all the training staff and doctors and everyone here is not putting pressure on me to get back on the ice.”

Whatever one terms the injury, Dave Poulin, the Leafs’ vice-president of hockey operations, said management’s only role in Lupul’s recovery involves listening to its staff of experts, and to Lupul, and hoping for the best.

“It’s totally up to the player and the medical side. . . . We don’t get involved. We simply can’t,” Poulin said, speaking of the management team. “We leave it up to our trainers and our doctors and our players. This is a veteran player who knows his body. And when he feels he’s 100 per cent, he’ll be ready to play. The encouraging thing is he feels better each day.”

Leaving out the injury-induced interruptions to this truncated season, Lupul, who also missed 25 games with a fractured forearm, has never looked better as an NHLer. He’s put up 14 points in 10 games. He credits extra work on his skating and shooting and puck handling for his electric work.

“I’ve played lots of years on lots of teams and I know other guys aren’t doing that,” said Lupul, 29. “So when you’re putting in more work than other guys, and you know you’re more prepared, it does give you an extra little boost, a little more confidence knowing that you’ve done more than the other guys.”

Still, he’ll certainly have more peace of mind when he’s feeling well enough to be back in uniform. He’s been diagnosed with at least a couple of previous concussions, in 2008 and 2005. On both occasions he has returned strong and ready to perform — although in 2005, he said he continued playing in a game after he had been concussed and missed most of a month. Thank the hockey gods for medical oversight, not to mention some relative luck in the head-injury lottery.

“(Three concussions) is really not that bad for playing 20 years of competitive hockey,” said Lupul, 29. “I’ve never had any of those serious ones, where you hear the stories about guys having lots of issues focusing and sleeping and reading and things like that. That’s a scary thing. (This) is nothing that I see putting a big dent in my season.

“I’ve missed lots of games this year, and I’m confident that — however many games I miss now, whether it be three, four or more, you never know — I’m confident I can put in the work and come back and play the same way.”

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